Every music blog this Friday is going to tell you that the real star of Kendrick Lamar’s crazy, psychedelic, sexy, scary music video for “Loyalty” is Rihanna. But here at Inverse, I am going to tell you that Loyalty’s real star is the slick-as-hell royal blue BMW i8.
Just kidding, it’s still Rihanna. But the car is pretty damn cool. In the video, Kendrick and Rihanna straight up jack the Beamer from a guy — Lamar beats up a guy twice his size, but it’s his video so why not — then take it for a joyride, doing doughnuts in the middle of an intersection until they get T-boned by a truck. The video as a whole is pretty spectacular, but let’s talk about the car for a second.
The BMW i8
Released in 2014, the BMW i8 turned a lot of heads for being the weird lovechild of a supercar and a Toyota Prius. It’s a plug-in hybrid that can travel between 15 and 22 miles in electric only mode, but that has a 231-horsepower turbocharged 1.5-liter 3-cylinder gas engine in it as well. It gets an average of 76 miles per gallon with both engines combined, but only does about 26 when in gas-only mode. But that’s the boring stuff — the fun part is it’s also fast as heck. It does 0-60 in 4.5 seconds, which is considerably slower than all-electric supercars, but still pretty good, and more than powerful enough to rip some sick doughnuts, as Kendrick and RiRi do:
The collision with the truck is a bit more wild, though. In the video the i8 gets slammed by a truck right on Rihanna’s side of the car. The two singers laugh it off, apparently completely unscathed:
It’s tough to verify this part. As The Car Connection notes, the i8 is made in such low volumes that neither the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) or the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) have conducted a full safety rating inspection of it.
The car has side-curtain airbags, which interestingly don’t deploy in the video. TCC says the best indicator of the i8’s crash rating is probably from the BMW i3, a similar hybrid-electric car which uses the same carbon-fiber reinforced siding. Here’s a side-crash test for the 2017 i3.
You can compare that to the crash at the end of the music video below if you want — it looks plausible that Kendrick and Rihanna could have walked away! Or, y’know, you could just watch the music video because it’s a good video. Your call.
